Being Lonely
by SKJC
Summary: Months after Once A Ranger, Tori and Kira have gone back to their regular lives, but they're both missing the connections they had to their Ranger teams and each other. Prefemslash, ToriKira. Maybe TBC?


Notes: Set a few months after Once A Ranger. I might continue this after NaNoWriMo.

Warnings: I don't own any incarnation of PR. Pre-femslash, completely G-rated at this point in time - hell, could be read as a friendship fic.

Being Lonely

--

Kira hadn't expected that being on tour would be so lonely. Sure, she'd had an idea, but the reality was really very depressing. It was amazing to have fans eager to see her, and she felt like she owed her producers and promoters - especially after the convoluted lie she'd had to come up with as an excuse for disappearing for so long to help out the Operation Overdrive Rangers - but as each show date came and went, she found herself missing normalcy - or what had passed for normalcy in her life in the recent past.

She and Trent had drifted apart. It was really for the best - she was always busy recording or performing and while he tried to be supportive, the lifestyle made him miserable. It bothered her that he hadn't kept in touch, but she heard through Dr. O that he'd finished film school and gotten a job in a Hollywood editing studio, and his work apparently kept him busy. Dr. O sounded almost melancholy when he shared that information, Kira thought. He was busy with his own work and research. She'd enjoyed getting to know his old friend Adam while they worked together, though, and she was going to make sure to embarrass him with some of Adam's stories the next time they were with the guys, but she wished she knew when that would be.

Conner was making a name for himself with his kids soccer program. He was the last person Kira had ever expected to get so completely immersed in his work.

Ethan was in grad school at MIT. He was still a nerd, she thought wryly. Ethan had found another of Dr. O's old friends in one of his engineering classes - Justin, another Blue Ranger, who they had remembered him from Dr. O's video diary - and Kira was sure that between the two of them, they would probably end up inventing stuff that future Rangers would be saving the world from.

Blue Rangers.. That made her think of Tori. She probably missed the water ninja more than anyone else, even though they hadn't served together as Rangers for long. They'd had a lot in common from the start, and the time they'd spent helping out Mr. Hartford and the Sentinel Knight had only made them closer. She spent a lot of time these days wondering what her Ranger days would have been like if they'd really been on a team together.

Kira fiddled with the business card while her thoughts consumed her. '_Tori Hanson, Custom Surfboards,'_ it read, with a store address in Blue Bay Harbor and business and cell phone numbers under the text, and an image of a blue dolphin embossed into the background. She twirled her hair absently as she considered calling. The other girl was a ninja academy teacher, ran her own business, and still managed to be an extremely competitive surfer. Why would she have time to talk on the phone?

--

Tori flipped a light on in her apartment and dropped her duffel bag on the floor. She closed the shop early enough to get to her evening classes at the Academy, but since she lived in town, it still left her getting home later than she'd like.

Her life was far from uneventful. She had her students, and her job. And it wasn't like her friends had dropped off the face of the earth. She went to Dustin's freestyle competitions, when they were in the area - mostly to keep Shane from freaking out too badly - and she saw the two of them at the Academy too, of course. Between all their classes, maybe it wasn't very often, but it was something.

Cam had quit his head teacher position after a year, passing it on to Shane, whom he'd deemed much more able to deal with "all the mind-numbing stupidity," and gone to grad school. The last time he'd called, it was with news that he'd been recruited by two former Rangers with an organization called the Silver Guardians to work on weapons technology - and that Hunter's new project since leaving the Thunder Academy had been to start a motocross training camp for kids. Tori appreciated their attempts to stay in touch, but envied the fact that they were so close that Hunter would pack up and follow Cam to Silver Hills without a second thought.

She couldn't do that. Blake was still enjoying a lucrative career in racing. They'd finally stopped kidding themselves about trying to have a relationship on the schedules they had to keep, as much as it had pained Tori to admit it. They were still friends, but not even Hunter actually saw him that often, between all the traveling and training he did.

Tori went to dig through the refrigerator, hoping there was something left for her to warm up without cooking. A Tupperware container of leftover veggie lasagna from the weekend still looked edible, and it was nutritious enough to pass for dinner. She put it in the microwave and flipped the radio on, and the familiar melody playing made her smile.

_'Kira practiced this single the whole time we were at Mr. Hartford's,' _she thought. Hearing her old friend's music always made her nostalgic. As she sat down to eat, her cell phone went off. She didn't recognize the caller ID number, but that didn't mean anything - if it was anyone from the Academy, the holographic forcefields would scramble the number anyway. She flipped the phone open.

"Tori Hanson, who's calling?"

"Uh, hey, it's Kira."

"Wow, hi!" Tori was grinning with shock. "I was just thinking about you - they were playing your new song on the radio."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Really? That's kind of weird."

Tori laughed. "Yeah. Maybe it was a sign?"

"Maybe," Kira agreed, giggling as well. "I'm in LA for a show this weekend - Saturday afternoon, actually - and I was kind of hoping if you weren't busy, you could come? We could hang out afterwards.. It's been a while."

"I should be able to pull that off." Tori thought about it for a moment. "I don't have anything going on this weekend, and I can have somebody else run the shop on Saturday - I think they can manage without me for a day."

"Awesome." Kira sounded relieved. "Uh, so the show starts at 5:00.. I'll have them hold a pass at will call for you?"

"I'll be looking forward to it," Tori promised.

--


End file.
